An amphibian writer, translator, poltergeist,researcher... my doppelganger pretends to be a Professor of English, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Double Crossing Two Traditions: On Skin, Spam and Other Fake Encounters

One never knows
where a poem may end up. The poems in Skin,Spam and Other Fake encounters, (Poetrywala, Mumbai 2012), began in
Marathi, an eight hundred years old language of the western India with millions
of speakers. Now they are also illegal
immigrants into English. However, these outlying Anglicized cousins of the
Marathi poems display no symptoms of guilt.

The poems
attempt to confront innovatively the new cultural material of the globalized
Third World society I inhabit. The cultural
politics and traditions within which they are located in Marathi are obviously
very different from the cultural politics and traditions in which they are
placed after translation. During the late nineteen fifties and sixties, the
little magazine movement in Maharashtra gathered momentum out of a need for
alternative poetics and politics. They were often avant-garde and were closely
associated with the leftist, the feminist, the Dalit, the grameen,
nativist politics and activism. The entire thrust of these movements was to
decolonize, democratize and debrahmanize literary values. The movement gave
Marathi the poets like Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, and Namdeo Dhasal. The
movements lost force during the late seventies and the eighties due to altered
social structures and values.

The little
magazine movements resurfaced during the nineteen nineties, largely in response
to the powerful forces of globalization rapidly altering the social and
cultural landscape after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of
the Indian economy. The digital revolution, explosion in newer forms of media
and outburst of cable television played a decisive role in altering the ‘semiosphere’
we occupy. These new little magazines
acknowledged the importance and influence of the precursor movements, but
insisted on moving on. The little magazines like Abhidhanantar, Shabdavedh
and Sausthav in the nineties provided a platform for fresh poetic practice
along with critical voices which demanded a new conceptual framework for
studying this poetry. This, however, does not mean that the older dogmas of the
sixties have completely given way to the newer ways of writing and conceptualizing
literature. The resistance to the new and the emergent has stubbornly persisted,
but it has not succeeded in blocking new creativity. Seen in this context, my Marathi poetry
contains both residual and emergent cultural material, used and abused for
poetic purpose. The selection presented here is from my Marathi collections, ‘Bhintishivaichya Khidkitun Dokavtana’ (2004) and Jarsandhachya Blogvarche
Kahi Ansh (2010). I am a Maharashtrian born and educated in Gujarat.
English was the medium of instruction and Gujarati was the medium of social
interaction. Marathi was largely confined to domestic conversation. Hence, one
can say that my poems have emerged from the liminal in-between cultural spaces.

Marathi poetry
like mine, influenced by the international modernist poetics, is marginal in
the mainstream of Marathi poetry which is socialist realist, if it is not
sentimental and popular. On the other hand, the status of Indian poetry in
English translation is secondary compared to Indian poetry written in
English. It is from these double
marginal spaces that I double cross both the traditions.

The
translations appeared in New Quest, India.poetryinternationalweb.com,
cerebrations.org and Museindia.com. I wish to thank all the publishers of my
Marathi originals and the English translations. I specially want to thank
Hemant Divate, editor of Abhidhanantar and the publisher of this volume. I wish
to thank my colleagues Dr Deeptha Achar, Dr. Susan Bhatt and Dr. Aarati
Mujumdar for going through my poems with a critical eye and making invaluable
suggestions.

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Sachin C. Ketkar (b. 1972) is a bilingual writer,
translator, editor, blogger and researcher based in Baroda, Gujarat. His recent
publication is a collection of Marathi critical articles on contemporary
Marathi Poetry, globalization and translation studies titled Changlya Kavitevarchi Statutory Warning:
Samkaleen Marathi Kavita, Jagatikikarn ani Bhashantar (2016). His Marathi
collections of poems are Jarasandhachya
Blogvarche Kahi Ansh (2010) and Bhintishivaicya Khidkitun Dokavtana, (2004). His poetry in English
include Skin, Spam and Other Fake
Encounters: Selected Marathi Poems in translation, (2011), and A Dirge for the Dead Dog and Other
Incantations (2003). Several of his writings on translation are published
as (Trans) Migrating Words: Refractions
on Indian Translation Studies (2010).

He has extensively translated from Marathi and
Gujarati.Most of his translations of
contemporary Marathi poetry are collected in the anthology Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry (2005) edited by
him. Along with numerous recent Gujarati writers, he has rendered the fifteenth
century Gujarati poet Narsinh Mehta into English for his doctoral research. He
has also translated the work of the well-known contemporary Gujarati writers
like Manilal Desai, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakkar, Jayant Khatri, Mangal
Rathod, Jaydev Shukla, Rajesh Pandya, Rajendra Patel, Nazir Mansuri, Ajay
Sarvaiya and Mona Patrawala. He has also translated poems of Ted Hughes and
fiction by Jorge Luis Borges and Adam Thopre’s into Marathi. He won ‘Indian
Literature Poetry Translation Prize’, awarded by Indian Literature Journal,
Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in 2000.

He holds a doctorate from VN South Gujarat
University, Surat and works as Professor in English, Faculty of Arts, The
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara. He is also Coordinator of
the department research project under UGC SAP DRS II on “Representing the
Region: Literary Discourses, Social Movements and Cultural Forms in Western
India, 1960-2000.